Five by Five

We survived Christmas!  And of course, I hope you did as well.  It was an interesting holiday this year.  We escaped the holiday without having to make a single 911 call and there were no trips to the ER.  This year's drama was centered around the weather.  Well, and the baking.  All I'm going to say about the baking is that my awesome Thanksgiving baking karma did not hold through Christmas.  In fact, it pretty much bit me on the a$$.  Let's just say there were a few problems in the kitchen.  I'll leave it at that.

But the Christmas weather drama....  It rained.  It was hot and it rained.  And it rained and rained and rained.  It was so hot, my son wore shorts to Christmas dinner and the rest of us wore summer shirts rather than Christmas sweaters.  It was so hot we turned the air conditioner on in the house. And then there was the rain.  It wasn't just rain, it was RAIN!  It rained and rained and rained.  It thunder stormed for almost 24 hours straight.  Literally!  The thunder storms started around 10 a.m. on Christmas Eve morning and didn't stop until around 7 p.m. Christmas night.  Rivers, creeks, fields and yards flooded and trees fell.  It rained so hard on Christmas Eve that by late afternoon, you could ride around the neighborhood & hear three out of five houses' septic tank alarms ringing.  We pretended it was Santa's sleigh bells.

But weather & cooking drama aside, we had a very nice Christmas.  I managed to get all the gift knitting done.  Done in time to get them wrapped.  Okay, bagged.  Thank God for gift bags!  Anyway, the gift knitting got done, although not photographed, and I even had a few minutes to  cast on a #ChristmasEveCastOn project.

#ChristmasEveCastOn

Actually, two #ChristmasEveCastOn projects.  The first was a hat.  The yarn is Yarn Bee Dazzling in the Tropics colorway.  I don't remember buying it, but it was in my stash pile and it's sparkly jewel tones seemed festive and I thought it would be a nice break from all that brown & white gift knitting I did.  Why?  Why was every single gift I knit this year either brown or white?  Why?

Even though I was happy to knit a sparkly hat, I couldn't stop thinking about the yarn I'd balled just a few days earlier.

#ChristmasEveCastOn

Moment's before leaving to go deliver gifts and getting in the passenger seat of the car, with my daughter behind the wheel, I decided I needed something a little more special to take my mind off my baby girl driving us around in the pouring down, road flooding rain & holiday traffic.  I grabbed those green yarns, a pair of needles and cast on the Five by Five Cowl.

Five by Five Cowl

It turns out, the Five by Five is a super simple, quick to knit project.  I've already finished it and would have worn it, except it's still a little on the warm side.  By the end of the week though, in typical Virginia fashion, the temperatures will crash and it will be back down into the 20's where it's supposed to be this time of year.  And I'll be wearing my gorgeous Five by Five cowl.  Except...

Except this pattern was so easy and so much fun and I have about 1,000 different workable yarn combinations in my stash pile....  I may be wearing a totally different one by this weekend.

And let's not mention how desperately I want to binge watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer now.  Thanks for that, Five by Five.